Jennifer and I have been blogging Sundance for Two Whole Weeks, through thick and thin, misplaced modifiers, premier/premiere problems, and cogent ideas that, despite All Best Efforts, trail off into meaningless babble. I never knew blog maintenance was so demanding! My whole day is taken up with movies, the constant hunt for free wifi (between 11p and 6:30a, if I sit on top left corner of my hide-a-bed couch and put my MacBook up to my chin, I can steal one bar from a neighboring condo), and correcting the typos on my previous post.
Don't get me wrong. Not complaining! But I haven't had the chance to surf the festival yet, until this afternoon. And I discovered, no surprise, this mega-event has a lively existence in the virtual world. Some recommended links:
• A group of Park City-based geeks ran Sundance catalogue notes, old and new, through their Bayseian spam-filtering programs (illustration above) and voila! They've created Deconstructing Sundance, featuring predictions about who will win awards in Park City. They went four-for-four in 2006. So, with a few days in the fest still to go, I'm ready to play Redford and hand out the statuettes to … Never Forever (for best narrative feature) and For God Tells Me So (for best documentary feature). Congratulations to the winners! Please exit stage left.
• Our friend Mark has this cool, weird life in which he jets around the country projecting films at various festivals. From his perch atop each theater, Mark has a bird's-eye view of Sundance, which he shares, via some insta-video, at Poverty Jet Set.
•Filmmaker Lance Weiler skipped this year's fest but obviously had deep regrets about missing all of the witty repartee that comes with it. So he set up Fest Mob, where you can text in something clever (no more than 100 characters please!) and taunt Yarrow-bound losers like me with info about where the cool kids are hangin'.
• A longtime backbone of the Sundance scene, the good people at indieWire blogulate like mad, grab scoops, review every dang film and post snapshots that are the envy of ToM's photo-challenged Sundance team. Plus, new this year: video!
• Angry, witty and painfully over-absorbed in the Oscar race, Movie City News gives an excellent scan of the film writing du jour. It's mandatory for industry junkies, if a bit head-scratching for non-initiates.
